gjâ-zym-byn (gzb)

gjâ-zym-byn is a personal language I use pretty much every day,
thinking in it, praying in it, sometimes talking to myself even on
days when I don't happen to read or write in it. I started working on
it in early 1998, as a psychological experiment; I aimed for a balance
of exoticity and learnability so I could try out new grammatical and
semantic structures and see how they affect my thinking — and
whether
in fact I would be able to learn to use them fluently. I also
stocked the phoneme inventory with several exotic sounds that I could
(at the time I created the language or added them to it) just barely
pronounce. To compensate, I severely limited the ways consonants can
cluster.

I've been intermittently keeping my journal in gjâ-zym-byn since
about 2001 (for the first couple of years I was not yet fluent enough
in it, nor did it have a large enough vocabulary, to use it thus), and
re-reading old journal entries (besides a few original stories and
several translations) from time to time to build fluency. I also use
gzb for prayer, to-do lists, grocery lists, documenting other,
less well-developed conlangs, and making notes about natural
languages I'm studying, among other things.

The language has changed a lot over the years -- primarily
in the first two years (I kept altering the phonology for the
first twenty-six months, and made major alterations to the grammar in
the first year), but some aspects of the grammar have still not quite
settled down (conditional/subjunctive clauses, for instance, and the
argument structures of a few verbs), and of course I add new root words
from time to time as I think of a concept that I can't conveniently
express with a short compound, or finally decide that an existing
compound is too long for frequent use.

I was honored to have gjâ-zym-byn selected, in a tie with Sylvia
Sotomayor's Kēlen, for
the conlang_learners
project. Send mail to gjax-zym-byn-subscribe@googlegroups.com if
you're interested in joining, or see
the list
archives (you can read the archives online without joining the
list).

Scripts

gzb-ascii-unicode.awk, used
to convert from my old ASCII transcription to Unicode HTML entities.
Not useful to anybody else as-is, but some conlangers may find they
can adapt it to their own conlangs easier than writing something from
scratch.

htmlize-with-tables-and-interlinear-glosses.pl —
used to convert formatted text files to HTML. Lines with three or
more spaces in a row signal the start of an interlinear gloss, which
is converted into a table with one cell per word. Lines with one or
more tabs signal the start of a table; any sequence of tabs marks a
cell boundary. A series of dashes becomes <HR>, and the next
text line after such a dash line becomes <H2>, etc. The
morphemes in the first line of an interlinear gloss are linked to
lexicon entries in the gzb alphabetical
lexicon; you could comment this section out and uncomment the old
version of that code which just puts them in table cells, or modify
it to link to your conlang's lexicon.

gen-glossed-doc-frameset.pl,
used to create framesets where the upper frame shows a text in gzb
with every word or morpheme hyperlinked to its definition in the
lexicon, and the lower frame shows the lexicon itself.

gen-nxcgtx_categ_htm.sh, gen-nxcgtx_htm.pl,
gen-nxcgtx_htm.sh, makeboth_nxcgtx.sh
— used to generate the HTML versions of the gzb lexicon
from the ASCII version. It hyperlinks morphemes within
compound words to their definitions, and hyperlinks
cross-references within definitions to the definitions of the
cross-referenced words.

findexample.sh, find-examples.awk, gen-sample-sentence-search.awk
— given ASCII gzb text on the command line, search the
HTML files for uses of that word or phrase

twax-zox.pl — take gzb text on the command line,
turn it into HTML Unicode text, and start a browser window displaying
the nonce HTML file (useful for copying and pasting text into an email
or chat window)

Philip Newton has created several scripts for gzb, which
he's shared on his
website. They include a vim keyboard layout, a Windows keyboard
layout, and instructions for using the Firefox Transliterator Add-on
to enter gzb text.